Pretrial Practice: Civil

Catalog description

This course picks up where most first-year legal research and writing courses leave off. We will examine intensively, among other things, the various discovery devices (including depositions, interrogatories, document requests, and requests to admit), pretrial motion practice, litigation as a means of achieving the best possible negotiated result, and alternative dispute resolution mechanisms (including mediation and arbitration). In other words, we will study the things that litigators spend most of their time doing and thinking about: how lawyers go about gathering and preserving evidence, the everyday interactions they have with courts, and the reasons they do all these things even though they rarely expect to get all the way to trial. The course will include simulations and extensive drafting assignments.